Loki the Punk
by mudpie102
Summary: Loki is banished from Asgard where he becomes a punk. Biography style.


**In case it isn't clear, this is done in a biography style. It's set post-avengers and is about the life of Loki as a punk musician banished from Asgard.**

**I do not own the characters, they are from random things or Norse Mythology/ Marvel. Some are made up and any resemblance to real life people is purely coincidental.**

One evening as a friend and I were ordering coffee, the young barista behind the counter noticed my Norse Mythology T-shirt. "Oh, I'm in love with Loki", she confided. "Have you ever read the Avengers comics? I fell in love with him after reading those". As soon as I was away from the counter, I explained to my companion just how disturbing the young woman's admission was. Among the many unflattering anecdotes about Loki that appear in the comics is one in which, while saving Asgard from a deal they made he impregnates a horse and gives the foal to Odin as a gift.

While stories like these are in no short supply, neither are fans like the barista, who continue to idolize Loki after he was banished to Earth - a junkie, accused murderer of his girlfriend Sigyn, - nearly twenty-three years after he died of an overdose. The god version of Sid Vicious, Loki solidified his fame by dying young, for a god (at age 1234), leaving behind memories of his notorious behavior and the mystery of girlfriend Sigyn murder. Although he contributed little to the myths, Loki remains its most famous name, and his cult has only grown thanks to T-shirts and posters bearing his likeness and slogans like "Go fuck a horse" and "Drugs Kill", and especially the iconographic 2012 film The Avengers. Besides being a wildly inaccurate depiction of the god , the Jez Weddon hit upset Loki's brother and friend Thor, who said, "The chap who played Loki, Tim Hoddleston, I thought was quite good. But even he only played the stage persona as opposed to the real person". Thor later on married Tim Hoddleston and was too banished to Earth by his father Odin.

But just who was "the real person" anyway? Reminiscences of friends and acquaintances offer endless contradictions, alternately portraying him as slow, intelligent but inarticulate, sensitive, destructive, kind, angry, passive, and violent. About the only adjective that can be irrefutably applied to Loki is "troubled". He even once tried to rule the Earth, but failed miserably and was captured by the superhero team known as the Avengers.

Given the turbulent nature of his childhood, it's little surprise that Loki was unable to cope in our Midgardian world. Born to the king of the frost giants on an unknown date, Loki was adopted the son of Odin and Frigga, king and queen of Asgard.

Loki was banished for his misdeeds to Earth where he joined a punk band and went crazy on drugs.

If Loki's onstage contributions to the music scene were minimal, however, his offstage antics made plenty of waves. His friend Sif of the warriors three recalled, "I'd seen Loki pull a long link of chain out of his jacket and spin it around to clear an entire dance floor. If anyone got caught in the chain, it was tough shit" At the 100 Club Punk Festival, Loki allegedly threw a glass at Tony Stark while he was showing off and performing. When it shattered against a pillar, sending glass shards into the face of Tony Stark's girlfriend Pepper Potts, Loki was arrested. Most famously, he beat music journalist Balder with a bicycle chain at a 100 Club gig for criticizing his band in print. What is most telling about the incident is that none of the accounts of it include any mention of what balder actually wrote; it is Loki who gets the attention, just as he would have wanted it.

As aggressive as he was towards others, Loki was equally abusive to himself. Thor's friend Chad Himsith recalled that when he would visit one of the squats Thor and Loki shared whilst Loki was settling in, "Loki would strangle cats and slash himself with an old Heinz baked beans tin lid" . During that period, Thor tried to stop Loki burning himself with cigarettes. Thor's mother also witnessed such incidents, and attributed them to Loki's desperate need for attention: "If he was sitting here and no one was taking any notice of him, he'd cut his hand or something to attract attention. You'd have to take your mind off everything else and look at him" .

Loki's self-destructive habits also extended to drugs; he had been mainlining speed from the time he arrived. Chad recalled seeing him shooting up and asking where he'd gotten the stuff, only to be told it was "me mum's". New York punk musician Hoder concurred that Loki was taking drugs intravenously even before he joined the band. During the gods first visit to England, Hoder, no stranger to depravity himself, seemed taken aback by what he witnessed: "Loki pulled out a set of works and put a whole bunch of speed in the syringe and then stuck the needle in the toilet with all the puke and piss in there and loaded it. He didn't cook it up. He just shook it, stuck it in his arm, and got off" .

Still, many others remember the Loki of that period fondly, including Steve Rogers of the Avengers , who said, "Actually, before he got deeply into drugs, he was one of the funniest guys. He had a brilliant sense of humor, goofy, sweet, and very cute. Obviously after his ruling and mad power episode!" .

Photographer and former IMF associate Johnny Remmer, who briefly attempted to manage the mission impossible team, got a first impression of Loki as being very vulnerable. The pair met at a Christmas dinner at journalist Sasha Wohan's house. A homesick American, Remmers started crying when he heard a Jim Reeves song playing on the stereo, and walked upstairs to discover Loki in a similar state - "this tall guy, just sitting there crying" .

That would all change in the spring of 2013, when Loki was invited to replace a bassist, whose more conventional musicianship had clashed with Thor's confrontational politics from the start of Loki's music career. While Thor seemed to believe the bass player job would provide Loki with some direction (as well as give him an ally in the world), his own foster father saw the inherent danger in inviting such an unstable, volatile personality into the band. Thor recalled, "When I got Loki into his band, my dad sighed. 'What kind of wicked reasons have you got behind that?' I didn't have any wicked reasons at the time, but I think my parents spotted it as a bad move".

Certainly, Loki addition was not a brilliant move from a musical point of view, since he didn't even know how to play bass. As Heimdall saw it, "After that, it was nothing to do with music anymore. It would just be for the sensationalism and scandal of it all.".

Indeed, a band member was initially thrilled about adding Loki's fiery personality to the band, saying, "When Loki joined he couldn't play guitar but his craziness fit into the structure of the band. He was the knight in shining armor with a giant fist" .

While Loki had shown a predilection for violence and drugs before joining the band, being in a successful band gave him carte blanche to go out of control. "Up to that time, Loki was absolutely childlike. Everything was fun and giggly. Suddenly he was a big pop star", Thor remembered. "Pop star status meant press, a good chance to be spotted in all the right places, adoration. That's what it all meant to Loki. I never dreamed he would perceive it that way. I thought he was far smarter" .

Adoration - and significantly more trouble - came in the form of Sigyn, a Mythology fan who had traveled to London from New York to be where the "action" was. A heroin addict with a history of severe emotional problems, Sigyn's main ambition at the time was to become the girlfriend of a rock star. With Loki, she not only fulfilled her goal, but also found someone whose dependence on her gave her a purpose.

Before Sigyn, Loki had limited experience in matters of romance. Like his self-esteem, Loki's sexuality was fluid and unformed. Angrboda recalled having conversations with Loki about his sexual orientation: "I thought that he would have sex with me, but the next morning he'd freak out: 'What have I done, am I a queer?'".

As in his relationship with Sigyn, however, Loki seemed drawn to Angrboda more out of a need to be protected than anything blatantly sexual, sleeping in his arms "like a little baby", but never consummating the relationship.

Loki's ideas about the opposite sex seemed contradictory and confused. Former bandmate Fandral called Loki one of the least sexist people he knew, but an anecdote from Freya tells a different story. Trying to obtain the British equivalent of a green card, Freya was trying to talk Thor into marrying her so she could remain in the Asgard Royals.

Overhearing the pair discussing the subject one day, Loki gave his unsolicited opinion: "Loki stood up and said, 'I know! You want to marry Thor because he's going to be a king! And then you'll get pregnant, and then you'll.…'" According to Freya, "He went on and on, describing this absurd scenario - something like a seventies groupie girl might think. Everyone was horrified that Loki would have such a straitlaced idea" .

With Sigyn, Loki alternated between playing the gentleman and the brute. Once, when Sigyn was ill, he acted as her nursemaid, feeding her and calling her mother with daily updates on her health. Sigyn's mother, Bergelmir , recalled Loki being very polite and shy during their phone conversations, and when the pair visited the Bergelmir family home in Jotunheim , Loki was subdued and childlike, even letting Sigyn cut his meat for him. At other times, however, Loki would physically abuse Sigyn, a fact confirmed by Thor's husband, Tim Hoddleston. Loki was once arrested after beating Sigyn in a London hotel room (which prompted a band member to briefly throw him out of the band), and during her phone conversation with Bergelmir, Sigyn admitted that a number of beatings she'd claimed to have received from street thugs had actually occurred at the hands of Loki. Loki didn't mind participating in Sigyn's self-degradation either. He once told Thor that he watched her perform oral sex on a stranger in the alley behind their house, a service for which she earned fifteen pounds.

Many of Loki's friends, however, gloss over his physical abuse because Sigyn was so verbally abusive herself, and because they hold her responsible for introducing Loki to heroin. Judging from his true mother's history of abuse and his own practice of injecting speed, however, it seems that Loki might have found his way to hard drugs even without Sigyn's influence. There's no denying, however, that Loki and Sigyn's co-dependent relationship kept them both hooked. Thor hoped that the bands' American tour, which would separate Loki from Sigyn, would give his brother the opportunity to get straight. Instead, it turned out to be one of the vilest displays of rock 'n' roll excess imaginable, not only sending Loki straight down the tubes, but effectively putting an end to the promise that punk held.

The January 2014 tour, consisting mainly of stops in America's Deep South, did get Loki some much-needed supervision. Warner Brothers employee Vince Noir, who headed the road crew, was determined to keep Loki straight, if only so he'd fulfill his contractual obligations. Unfortunately, Loki also encountered a number of disturbed American fans and groupies who encouraged his self-destructive behavior, which soon became part of the live show. After being head-butted by one such fan at the Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas, Loki, never one to be upstaged, put on his own spectacle. "With blood trickling down his cheek and down his bare sunken chest toward his black jeans, he rips a pus-soaked bandage off his arm, revealing a deeper laceration. He throws the bandage into the crowd, and smiles wider while the devoted rip it to shreds, hungry for a special souvenir" .

As much a part of the show as his antics were, they didn't stop when Loki was out of the spotlight. At a truck stop en route to San Francisco, he outdid some rednecks who questioned his toughness - by plunging a steak knife into his hand and calmly proceeding to eat his meal. Offstage fights continued as well, although they were sometimes the result of Loki's strange way of bonding with others. According to Vince Noir, Loki challenged one of his bodyguards to a fight, and after being beaten up, said, "You're good enough. I like you. Now we can be friends".

During a play-fight with avenger Natasha Romanov, Loki broke her nail by kicking her, something he'd promised not to do just minutes earlier. Vince noted, "He wants to relate to people and he thinks the only way to do it is to fight them. He's capable of promising something one second and forgetting it the next" .

Unsurprisingly, Loki's broken promises included fulfilling his obligations to the band. After the first show of the tour, in Atlanta, he disappeared to look for heroin. He was later found in a hospital, where he'd been admitted after carving "I COULD HAVE DONE IT" on his chest with a knife. Within a few hours of arriving in Memphis, the tour's next stop, Loki was gone again, this time lured away by a promise of heroin from High Times publisher Draco Malfoy. Hoping to film the band for a documentary, Malfoy used Loki as collateral to ensure that Vince Noir would honor his request for access to the band. A confrontation between Vince and Malfoy at the latter's hotel room was interrupted when Loki made his presence known by attacking a security guard at the pool outside. Shaken by the display of violence, a band member refused Vince's request that he intervene. With no one willing to rein him in, Loki was free to destroy himself.

The mostly disastrous tour ended in San Francisco on January 14, 2014 with a much-anticipated show at the Winterland. What should have been the band's introduction to a large American punk audience turned out to be their final show. After playing a lackluster set during which the foursome hardly looked at one another, Thor summed it all up with the famous words, "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated out of your ticket?"

Punk magazine co-founder Legolas was one of many who felt cheated not only by the band, but by the punk movement in general: "It just felt like this phony media thing. Punk wasn't ours anymore. It had become everything we hated".

The band effectively ended after the Winterland show, although a band member briefly trudged on with Legolas and Gimli in order to finish their film, The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle. Although Loki shot some sequences for the film in Paris, he spent most of his time after the Winterland concert doping it up with Sigyn in London, then in New York. The freakish twosome garnered a lot of press attention on both sides of the Atlantic, establishing their legend even before their deaths. As Sigyn's mother said, "The press portrayed Loki and Sigyn as Romeo and Juliet in black leather, roaring with hel" .

Sigyn managed to set up a few solo shows for Loki in Kansas and in her home realm of Jotunheim . Despite having an all-star backing band, though, Loki was a failure, his nasal imitations of Thor drawing catcalls from the crowds at Kansas. Loki and Sigyn's dismal final days in New York appear to be portrayed fairly accurately in the film Avengers 2. On September 27, 2014, Sigyn's father delivered some of the couple's belongings to their room at the Chelsea Hotel. When he arrived, he found Loki and Sigyn in the kind of desolate state depicted in the movie - in bed, watching cartoons in the dark, surrounded by dirty clothes and garbage, and too strung out to notice his presence.

On October 8, Sigyn called Bergelmir, complaining that she was experiencing problems with her kidneys and asking for money. As was their routine, Mrs. Frosty instructed her daughter to see a doctor and have the bill sent to her parents. Before Sigyn could reply, the usually complacent Loki took the phone and started hurling abuse at Bergelmir, demanding to know, "How can you do this to your own fuckin' daughter?". When Sigyn called back later for what would be her final conversation with her mother, she was more calm and reasonable than she'd ever been. She told her mother about the beatings, explaining that Loki had been depressed and "not himself". Sigyn then asked Bergelmir to look into getting the two of them into a detoxification center. Before hanging up, Sigyn seemed to be tying up loose ends, asking about her grandmother and sending a message to her father that she loved him.

While out with friends on October 10, 2014, Sigyn purchased a knife for Loki. The following night, at least two different drug dealers visited the couple's hotel room, the last claiming to have seen Sigyn alive at 4 or 5 a.m. on October 12. Several hours after that, the front desk at the Chelsea received a call telling them someone was injured in Loki and Sigyn's room. When emergency personnel arrived, they found Sigyn slumped over in the bathroom, dead of a stab wound to the stomach, seemingly administered by the very knife she had was wandering the hallways, crying and agitated, when police arrived. His face was battered, but the bruising indicated that the beating had happened some time before police arrived. When his next-door neighbor came out of her room to see what was going on, Loki reportedly said to her, "I killed her...I can't live without her." He was also heard muttering through his tears, "She must have fallen on the knife." A known heroin addict, Loki was obviously high. Officers attempted to arrest him, but he resisted. Police subdued him and put him in handcuffs. Later that afternoon he was charged with second-degree homicide in the death of Sigyn. (In New York first-degree homicide is reserved for the killings of police and court officers in the line of duty.)

But Loki was released a few days later on bail provided by Virgin Records' Howard Moon at the prodding of a band member. The former band manager also secured famed attorney Peter Parker for Loki's defense. However, his motives for helping Loki did not seem entirely altruistic. After announcing that the band would reunite to record a Christmas album to benefit Loki's defense, a band member started selling T-shirts in his clothing store bearing the slogan, "I'M ALIVE. SHE'S DEAD. I'M YOURS" . Joining in the tasteless exploitation, the owner of the Philadelphia nightclub Artemis Fowl promised to honor the singing engagement that Sigyn had booked for Loki before her death.

Loki, meanwhile, alternated between mourning and living up to his wild reputation. It was reported that he told his arresting officers, "You can't arrest me dull creatures. I'm a god!", and while being escorted out of the Chelsea Hotel in handcuffs, he threatened the press, "I'll smash your cameras". Shortly after being released from Riker's Island, however, Loki phoned Bergelmir and told her, "I don't know why I'm alive anymore, now that Sigyn is gone". Soon after, Loki sent Mrs. Frosty a rambling, passionate letter in which he mourned for Sigyn, and included with it a poem that contained the lines "And I don't want to live this life / If I can't live for you" .

On October 23, Loki slit his wrists and attempted to jump out the window of the hotel room he was sharing with his foster mother had come down as they were worried about his mental state.

He was admitted to the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital, from which he phoned Bergelmir two days later. The two had a brief conversation during which Loki begged to come visit him. Soon afterward, she received a final letter from Loki, full of hints as to what might have taken place on the last night of Sigyn's life. "We always knew that we would go to the same place when we died", he wrote. "We so much wanted to die together in each other's arms. I cry every time I think about that. I promised my baby that I would kill myself if anything ever happened to her, and she promised me the same. This is my final commitment to my love" .

Although some friends of Loki's speculated that a drug dealer might have murdered Sigyn for money, she had made numerous suicide attempts in the past, and her mother had no trouble imagining a scenario in which Sigyn challenged Loki to prove his love by ending her misery.

After a few weeks at Bellevue, Loki was again released. This time, instead of wallowing in misery, he started partying again. On December 6 or 7, Loki got into a fight with Fred Weasley's brother George at a nightclub after lewdly grabbing his girlfriend, and ended up back in Riker's on felonious assault charges. A band member, preoccupied with his own legal matters and feeling it was best for Loki to dry out, was initially hesitant to bail Loki out. He eventually did put up the money, and Loki was freed once more on February 1, 2015.

That night, Loki celebrated his release at the apartment of a new girlfriend, actress Hannah Montana Although he had been clean for nearly two months, Loki took a shot of heroin that his girlfriend had purchased. The next morning, Frigga discovered her son dead of an overdose in Montana's bed. It was not until after his cremation that Frigga discovered a suicide note in the pocket of Loki's leather jacket. Ever the fashion-plate, Loki made sure his desired burial attire got as much attention as his motives: "We had a death pact. I have to keep my half of the bargain. Please bury me next to my baby. Bury me in my leather jacket, jeans and motor cycle boots. Goodbye".

Naive fans viewed Loki's death as the ultimate act of rebellion and punk ideals, a sign that he was willing to be punk's sacrificial lamb. Those closer to the situation, however, saw the stupidity of such an interpretation.

Fred Weasley's guitarist/collaborator Black Adder saw Loki's fall as symbolic of the death of punk itself: "When things start to fall apart, you look at situations like Loki - as I'm sure the hippies must have looked at Altamont - as 'Here's our symbol'" .

Looking back, it's easy to point fingers at those who could have prevented Loki's demise. While Odin's negligent parenting and a band members philosophy of destruction certainly contributed to Loki's problems, it is doubtful that even they could have stopped him from self-destructing. For his part, Thor tried to get Loki involved in new musical projects and even attempted to get in touch with him after Sigyn's murder (an effort that was thwarted by a band member and Frigga). As the one who probably tried hardest to save Loki, it is little surprise that he has given the most thoughtful comments on the subject of his brother's death. What might come as a surprise, though, is the sweet optimism of the man who once sang, "Get pissed, destroy": "This is all I have, life.… And to die over something as vaguely childish as rock 'n' roll is not on. Even though there's a lot of popularity in Loki's character, the people who buy the Norse myths…they're wasters…. I'm not part of that. I never was. I'll always go out and make sure it gets better. That's the difference between Loki's army and the Village Green Preservation Society. Life and death! There's nothing glorious in dying. Anyone can do it" .


End file.
